This is something I would call a matter of personal taste. I talked about it at Silly code reviews and shift, and as I said there, it certainly is common to find shift used in argument processing in core modules, CPAN, etc. I have personally tried it both ways.

My current opinion is that whether or not using shift for processing or assigning in one line is better is dependent on the rest of your coding style. As my style has changed it has gone from being definitely better to shift to (currently) being essentially indifferent.

Furthermore on named arguments, I agree that long argument lists maintained by argument order are a bad idea. But I do not agree that the Linux kernel CodingStyle applies directly to Perl. In particular in Perl it is often very good style to develop list-based functions which may easily have 10 or 1000 arguments. And often you want to provide various kinds of optional default behaviour. In which case, as suggested in the root node, I find it best to provide a named parameter style with reasonable defaults where appropriate. Typically the calls will either wind up (at least in my code) being a pass-through hash, or else I will just use a few of the possible options in any particular code.

Try it. It may take some time to be able to take good advantage of the flexibility offered. But I think that knowing how and when to do that is a good tool to put in your toolbox for languages that give you a way to do it.

In reply to Re (tilly) 3: Poor Man's Prototyping? by tilly
in thread Poor Man's Prototyping? by tame1

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